Androids: The team that built the Android operating system is a new book from longtime Android engineer Chet Haase. Haase has been on the Android team since 2010, and he interviewed dozens of Googlers for this book, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at early Android development. With Haase’s permission, we’re giving readers a look at chapters four and five of the book, “The Pitch,” and “The Acquisition.” That portion covers the independent Android Inc.’s search for venture capital and the team’s eventual meeting with Google. The book is out this weekend in eBook and paperback (Amazon, Google Play), and Haase is donating proceeds to Black Girls Code and Women Who Code.

By mid-2005, Android was acquired and the future looked bright. But just six months earlier, things weren’t quite as rosy. In January of that year, the startup was desperate for cash and their main task was the same as for most startups: getting funding. After the pivot from a camera OS to an open source phone platform, they still had the daunting task of actually building a product, which meant they’d need more money to hire a large enough team to do the work.

The original demo, written by Brian Swetland and Chris White and later enhanced by Fadden, showing a home screen and several apps (most of which were not implemented). It’s a far cry from a modern Android home screen. (credit: Chet Haase)

So the company focused on three things. First, they needed a demo to show what was possible. Next, they needed to articulate their vision and create a pitch deck to help explain that vision. Finally, they needed to take the demo and the slide deck on the road to pitch their story to potential investors.

Enlarge / A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket carrying a Cygnus resupply spacecraft launches from Pad-0A of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021, at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. (credit: NASA)

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Rocket Lab to launch Moon mission from New Zealand. The company will launch the CAPSTONE mission to the Moon from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand during the fourth quarter of 2021, Radio New Zealand reports. This will be Rocket Lab’s first lunar mission, and the 20 kg satellite will validate innovative navigation technologies and verify the dynamics of a halo-shaped orbit around the Moon.

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  Guy (Ryan Reynolds) discovers that things inside his world look a lot different when you have special sunglasses. [credit:
  20th Century Studios
  ]

In video games and computer graphics, the concept of the “uncanny valley” can emerge once something approaches visual realism. The more a virtual character looks like a human, the more our brains squarely focus on the CGI inaccuracies.

I kept thinking about this concept after seeing Free Guy, a new film from the combined Disney-Fox borg that takes gaming authenticity very seriously. But I didn’t feel that way because the movie, starring Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool) and Taika Waititi (What We Do In The Shadows), resembles the CGI tragedy of 1999’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Rather, Free Guy‘s insistence on gaming-universe authenticity, which it takes damned seriously, means it approaches a conceptual uncanny valley. How much that’ll annoy you is arguably the biggest question mark attached to an otherwise solid, fun, and family-friendly action flick.

Enlarge / Image of the hole in Soyuz MS-09 vehicle docked to the International Space Station in 2018. (credit: NASA TV)

The context for the article is the recent, near-disastrous docking of the Russian Nauka science module with the International Space Station. The TASS article attempts to rebut criticism in US publications (including Ars Technica) that covered the incident and raised questions about the future of the Roscosmos-NASA partnership in space.

One of a dozen rebuttals in the TASS article concerns a 2018 incident—a 2 mm breach in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 vehicle docked with the International Space Station. Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, and NASA’s Auñón-Chancellor had flown to the station inside this Soyuz in June. The leak was discovered in late August.

Enlarge / Get excited! The new Calculator app is here!! (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Microsoft is giving the Windows 11 treatment to a handful of core apps in the next Insider Preview build of the upcoming operating system. Mail, Calendar, the Calculator, and the Snipping Tool are all being revamped, and if you’re running the latest Insider Preview, you should be able to grab these updates from within the Windows Store app starting today.

The changes in Mail, Calendar, and Calculator appear to be largely cosmetic, ejecting the squared-off corners of Windows 8 and 10 for a softer, more rounded look that fits in with the rest of the operating system. The one “new” app is a revamp of the Snipping Tool that unifies the features of the old Snipping Tool and the Windows 10 Snip & Sketch app (this update brings the useful side effect of finally getting rid of the annoying message telling you that the Snipping Tool is going away every time you open it up).

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  The new Snipping Tool updates its predecessor’s Windows 7-era UI while integrating the features of Windows 10’s duplicative Snip & Sketch tool. [credit:
  Microsoft
  ]

The new Snipping Tool still gives you buttons for changing what kind of screenshot you’re trying to take and whether you want it to happen on a delay. Its annotating tools for screenshots have been given a more modern facelift, too (the old ones were stuck in the Windows 7 era). Snip & Sketch users can continue to access that handy UI by using the Windows + Shift + S keyboard shortcut.

Enlarge / Astronomers continue to ponder the strange, dramatic dimming in the light from Betelgeuse, a bright red star in the Orion constellation, first observed in December 2019. (credit: ESO/M. Montargès et al.)

Back in June, we reported on a likely explanation for the strange, dramatic dimming of Betelgeuse, a bright red star in the Orion constellation: The star burped out a massive gas bubble, resulting in lower temperatures that condensed heavier elements into dust that temporarily obscured the starlight. Now, a team of Chinese scientists has found evidence of a large, dark, cooler spot on the star—consistent with those earlier findings—based on spectral analysis, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

As Ars’ John Timmer reported last year, Betelgeuse is one of the closest massive stars to Earth, about 700 light-years away. It’s an old star that has reached the stage where it glows a dull red and expands, with the hot core only having a tenuous gravitational grip on its outer layers. The star has something akin to a heartbeat, albeit an extremely slow and irregular one. Over time, the star cycles through periods when its surface expands and then contracts.

Astronomers noticed the pronounced dimming of the light from Betelgeuse in December 2019; the difference was even visible to the naked eye. And the dimming persisted, decreasing in brightness by 35 percent in mid-February before brightening again in April 2020. Astronomers puzzled over the phenomenon and wondered whether it was a sign that the star was about to go supernova. 

I’m a big believer in taking electric vehicles camping. But charging infrastructure in the US is still patchy enough that a week in the wilderness might induce too much range anxiety to be practical. That’s particularly true if your idea of camping involves a trailer rather than a tent; nothing saps an EV’s range quite like towing.

A new camper from Colorado Teardrops might solve this issue. The camper is called the Boulder, after the company’s home base, where it has been building teardrop trailers since 2014. But this one is a bit different from the company’s more conventional teardrop campers.

Usually, towing has a double-whammy effect on EV range, massively increasing drag while adding a lot of extra mass; this combination is often enough to halve an EV’s range on a full charge. The Boulder’s shape has been subjected to computational fluid dynamics simulations to combat the deleterious effects of added wind resistance and ensure that the camper is as low-drag as possible. The company also applied lightweighting to the trailer to get the overall weight down to 1,950 lbs (885 kg).

Enlarge (credit: Yuriko Nakao | Getty Images)

Poly Network first disclosed the hack on Tuesday, saying that the hacker, or hackers, had stolen crypto coins worth about $600 million at the time of the heist. The thousands of tokens included $270 million on the Ethereum blockchain, $250 million on the Binance Smart Chain, $84 million on the Polygon network, and a smattering of other smaller coins, like Tether, Shiba Inu, and Matic.

As of 4 am this morning, Poly Network says $342 million has been returned. The remainder, which is apparently all in Ethereum, is being “gradually transferred,” the company said.

Android tablets are totally coming back, right? Google has launched a few tablet apps lately after years of neglect, it gave talks at Google I/O on how to design tablets apps, and the Android 12 developer preview shows the company is working on a taskbar-like UI for big-screen devices. Now, the world’s most popular Android device manufacturer, Xiaomi, is releasing an Android tablet for the first time in three years.

The Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro seems just a little inspired by Apple’s flagship tablet, the iPad Pro. Xiaomi regularly produces wild, technology-packed designs, but it also occasionally falls back into old habits of being an Apple clone manufacturer. This is one of those times.

The company’s new tablet has an 11-inch, 120 Hz, 2560×1600 LCD and is relatively high-end with a Snapdragon 870 SoC (that’s a 7nm chip with four Cortex A77 cores and four Cortex A55 cores). The base unit comes with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, with options for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. There’s an 8600 mAh battery, NFC, a side fingerprint reader/power button, Wi-Fi 6 support, a USB-C port, and a whopping eight speakers, all split between the left and right sides. The frame and back are both aluminum, and the tablet weighs 515 g.

Enlarge / The privacy and access wars waged between consumers and content providers don’t seem likely to abate any time soon. (credit: metamorworks via Getty Images)

Netflix blocks known commercial VPNs and proxies from accessing its services in order to preserve its geofencing—partitioning access to content based on a user’s real-world location. Users who connect to a commercial VPN or proxy provider endpoint in another country can access content licensed for viewing in the endpoint country—but not in the viewer’s own.

Recently, as reported by TorrentFreak, Netflix began including putatively residential IP subnets in its blocklists.

Cat and mouse

Since Netflix first began blocking commercial VPN and proxy providers in 2015, those services have fought back by finding ways to evade its and other streaming services’ blocking attempts. The simplest way is just to discard an existing subnet that’s been widely identified as “VPN/proxy” and purchase another, “clean” space. This move can buy a blocklist evader a few days or even weeks before the new subnet is added to the list.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

US Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced their Open App Markets Act yesterday. Shortly after the senators announced the bill, a group funded by Apple and Google sent a statement to media claiming that the proposed law “is a finger in the eye of anyone who bought an iPhone or Android because the phones and their app stores are safe, reliable, and easy to use.”

The statement came from the “Chamber of Progress,” which calls itself “a new center-left tech industry policy coalition promoting technology’s progressive future.”

Enlarge / Star Trek: Lower Decks is back for more low-stakes fun in its second season. (credit: Paramount+)

Some of that is definitely rooted in nostalgia. Lower Decks intentionally recreates the aesthetic of ’90s-era Trek shows like The Next Generation and Voyager, from the ship design to the scoring to the blue typeface used for the credits. But it’s mostly because the show isn’t afraid to be low-stakes and silly and tell self-contained stories. This was a hallmark of ’90s Trek—Deep Space 9 followed the gorgeous, nuanced Far Beyond the Stars episode with a Honey I Shrunk the Kids spoof where someone accidentally makes a shuttlecraft tiny—but this sense of playfulness is often absent from the nonstop world-saving bombast of Discovery or the convoluted storytelling of Picard.

This isn’t to say that Lower Decks is always top-tier Trek. Its irreverent, self-referential style can get tiring in large doses, and there’s a fine line between “clever” and “lazy” in any show that leans this heavily on references to older shows for everything from throwaway sight gags to major plot points. But by the end of its first season, Lower Decks had proven it could be a good Trek show in addition to being a Trek reference factory, combining well-established characters, comedy, and genuinely engaging action sequences in the way that Futurama could when it was firing on all cylinders, and season two is more of the same.

Enlarge / An aerial view of the NSA. (credit: nsa.gov)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been named the winner of a $10 billion cloud computing contract, called “WildandStormy,” for the National Security Agency. But Microsoft, no doubt still salty about Amazon’s successful challenge of Redmond’s $10 billion JEDI contract with the Pentagon, filed a formal bid protest with the Government Accounting Office last month. 

Microsoft says that if the NSA had properly evaluated the bids, Microsoft would have won. The GAO will decide the outcome of the protest by the end of October. The news was first reported by the trade publication Washington Technology.

The award and protest come as US intelligence agencies have been looking at overhauling their computing and storage resources over the last several years. Currently, many of the agencies’ cloud operations use so-called GovCloud products from various vendors, including Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure. The initial move to the cloud was spurred years ago by the exponential increase in data that intelligence agencies were gathering and analyzing. That increase was outpacing the agencies’ ability to store it all in-house. AWS was an early winner and secured a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013.